The blog about obscurity of life and randomness of the human brain all in one place.

Friday, March 28, 2014

Sleeping late has been a moral issue and a cultural dilemma for a while now. When it's well-established that the circadian rhythm shifts later during your teenage years, I don't understand why early-rising moralists try to shove their ideology down our throats. Many teens are wired to feel tired later than adults. You'll never hear someone being called lazy for going to bed early.

I believe it is a remnant of ancient society's subsistence farming, irrelevant in the modern urban life, but forced to be carried out because of the deep rooted history behind it. Before electric light bulbs came around, someone who slept during daytime hours probably would have been looked down upon as wasting productive time, but now there is no excuse to be willfully ignorant. Even worse is when you're asked to just get up early to get work done. That's the same as me telling you to wake up at 3am instead of 9 to 'get work done'.

As for night owls being lazy, many people can still not comprehend the idea of sleeping late, and thus waking up later. If you're up 6 hours later than someone, then waking up late is not that absurd an idea. People who sleep late are often considered lazy, no matter what they're able to achieve in their one 24 hour day cycle while early risers are lauded for their productivity even if they hardly do anything else. If you sleep late working on a project, people will tell you at 8-9am to get your lazy ass out of the bed. Everyone's a bio student with vast knowledge about the sleeping patterns and how harmful sleeping late is, when all they have is a minimal understanding of science.

Also, god forbid you try to catch up on some sleep during the weekend, then you're literally the lowest scum of Earth. Yeah, well, I'm not burning daylight because I am not a farmer waiting to sow his crops. And it is not all hearsay, there's some science to back me up too! This has got to be the dream city - Overpopulation becomes such a huge problem in the world in the year 2051 that cities start switching over to this to help unclog the congestion caused by so many humans. Half the city is awake during the day, and half the city is awake during the night. Cities become more productive, and congestion on roads is cut in half.

What about sleeping late, waking up early and then taking a nap in the afternoon? Wikipedia explains it perfectly.Segmented sleep